peel 2-S Handheld 3D Scanner Announced

Peel 3D announced the peel 2-S handheld 3D scanner.

The Quebec-based company has been producing relatively inexpensive yet powerful handheld 3D scanners for a few years now. Their first product, the peel 1, was quite successful, and is still available at a lower cost. Later, they introduced the peel 2 3D scanner, which included a unique and optional reverse engineering feature with the peel 2 CAD version.

The peel 2-S is quite similar to the peel 2, but it has been “optimized to scan smaller parts.”

This is a very interesting development, as anyone who has used a 3D scanner will tell you that any scanning setup is optimized for a particular size of scan object. There are 3D scanners for buildings and landscapes, people and dogs, mechanical parts and tiny objects. But none of those scanners would be very good for other uses.

This is because the scanner manufacturers are trying to balance resolution versus computation capacity. For a large object, like a building, the resolution matters less, so the larger “pixels” of the scan are sprayed across larger faces of the building. On the other hand, that resolution would be awful for scanning a very small object.

A scanner optimized for smaller objects would present a tighter array of scanning pixels to probe the object’s surfaces.

That seems to be what’s happened with the peel 2-S. I presume “S” stands for “Small”? Apparently the peel 2-S has a typical resolution of only 0.1mm. That’s incredibly small and would certainly allow for 3D scanning for quite intricate objects.

It would not be useful for 3D scanning a person, however, as a person would surely be slightly moving more than 0.1mm every second. The peel 2-S is designed for scanning small mechanical objects.

The peel 2-S comes in to variations: the standard peel 2-S, and the peel 2-S CAD.

The peel 2-S CAD includes the reverse engineering feature first found on the peel 2 CAD device. This allows for scanning directly into CAD software, where reverse engineering can take place. This eliminates some steps in the process and could be useful for those performing repeated reverse engineering operations.

The peel 2-S is available now for US$7,890, and the peel 2-S CAD is available for US$9,890.

Via peel 3D